An author who wrote two books about homosexuality told managers at the University of Toledo in an open letter they should praise an administrator who said being "gay" is not the same as black, not suspend her.

The comments were addressed to University of Toledo President Lloyd Jacobs by Robert A.J. Gagnon, the author of "The Bible and Homosexual Practice: Texts and Hermeneutics" and "Homosexuality and the Bible: Two Views." Gagnon also is an associate professor at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary and the author of numerous other publications.

He was writing about the decision by officials at the University of Toledo to suspend an administrator for her statements in a guest column in a local newspaper.

Associate Vice President of Human Resources Crystal Dixon wrote the column in response to a newspaper editor's column criticizing a lack of equality for homosexuals. Dixon said, "I take great umbrage at the notion that those choosing the homosexual lifestyle are 'civil rights victims.' Here's why. I cannot wake up tomorrow and not be a black woman.'"

Ms. Dixon is absolutely right that sexual orientation is not akin to race or sex. Unlike a homosexual orientation, race and sex are 100% congenitally predetermined, cannot be fundamentally changed in their essence by cultural influences, and are not a primary or direct desire for behavior that is incompatible with embodied structures.

Of course, generally people don't wake up one morning and say, "I think I'll be a homosexual." Yet that is different from arguing that homosexual development is always and only something "given" like race and sex. Even the Kinsey Institute has acknowledged that nine out of ten persons with same-sex attractions will experience at least one shift on the Kinsey spectrum from 0 to 6 during their life; six out of ten will experience two or more shifts. The intensity of impulses, and sometimes even their direction, can and often do change over time. Like various forms of sexual impulses, the degree to which a homosexual "orientation" becomes fixed in an individual's brain and the intensity with which it is experienced, at least in part and for some, can be affected by choices regarding fantasy life, responses to social and environmental factors in childhood and adolescence, the degree to which one acts on impulses, and the degree of self-motivation for change.